The AA Visiting School (AAVS) is a worldwide network of v short courses, design workshops, research programmes and public forums held in the UK and across five continents each year. As a vital and living extension of the Architectural Association School of Architecture, AAVS also embodies the cultural and learning ethos of our many partners with whom we share the belief that architecture, like other human, cultural and educational endeavours, benefits indelibly from the bridging of the chasms opened as a result of the accelerating realities of global knowledge economies and professional practices.
In 2013–14 more than 50 workshops, laboratories and nomadic studios, along with a couple of Semester Programmes, one Night School, Summer School, Summer DLab and Visiting Teachers Programme, and more than 1,000 students of all ages and backgrounds convened around the planet and at Bedford Square and Hooke Park to rapidly make, think, discuss, debate and actively shape the future of architecture.
Where cultural externalisation is so often about exporting an established and dogmatic model to far-flung places with expected results, AAVS inverts that practice. It is learning, exploring, engaging, collaborating and experimenting with ‘local’ people, places and practices in order to reimagine the shape, form and expectations of architectural education, in the process constantly producing unimaginable outcomes. In this sense, the AA Visiting School is a contemporary wunderkammer. No two of its programmes are alike, and while the scale, material, methods and issues are unique to each programme, what they ultimately share is the AA’s unquenchable thirst for the unknown.
Welcome to a world of continuous architectural investigation, proposal-making and communication – a world where not only architecture, but also architectural learning, is everywhere.
Christopher Pierce
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